DLD06: Goodbye from a robot

Seventh session of day 2 of DLD06. (Conference's moblog - Flickr pictures - DLD06 at Google Blogsearch - Technorati dld06 tag).
Running notes: It's the final DLD session. After Edgar Koerner, president of the Honda Research Institute Europe, has told the story of its development (which is up on the robot's website) Asimo, the Honda humanoid robot, comes on stage. It walks around and goes up and down a small staircase (picture by Martin Roell from Flickr). I've already seen Asimo in action but most of this audience hasn't, so many stand up and agglutinate around the stage to take a closer look at the autonomous little robot that behaves like a kid was hiding inside its white shell. After Asimo leaves the stage, Koerner shows the videos of the most advanced model running (an engineering achievement that I've already blogged here - some tech data there, too) and talks about the next steps: adapting the robot to the human environment (spaces, movements), to human communication ("understand" emotions) and program it for self-learning and self-organizing. There are three research institutes within Honda working on developing a "brain" for Asimo. The robot has been under development for 20 years, but, says Koerner, before Honda can start "selling" it as a domestic help it will take another 10-15 years.